Relatives recall East Side homicide victim

Leonel Antonio Rios Hernandez, 30, was found brutally killed in an East Side apartment Monday evening.

Leonel Antonio Rios Hernandez, 30, was found brutally killed in an East Side apartment Monday evening.

Photo: Contributed Photo

Photo: Contributed Photo

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Leonel Antonio Rios Hernandez, 30, was found brutally killed in an East Side apartment Monday evening.

Leonel Antonio Rios Hernandez, 30, was found brutally killed in an East Side apartment Monday evening.

Photo: Contributed Photo

Relatives recall East Side homicide victim

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STAMFORD -- Ana Rios last heard from her brother Sunday night. He called to say he would come home around midnight because he had to work in the morning for their younger brother, a landscaper. She never heard from him again.

Leonel Antonio Rios-Hernandez, 30, was killed in what police are calling a savage beating in a shared Daly Street apartment on the East Side sometime after calling his sister, who provided details of her brother's homicide and last moments through a close family friend in a telephone interview Wednesday afternoon; Rios, a native of Guatemala, speaks limited English.

Rios, 34, at first thought her brother was sleeping off a late night out when he missed his 7 a.m. landscaping job on Monday. Through music from a small party next door, she recalled hearing him come home Sunday night with at least one other person. She didn't want to disturb his privacy the next morning, so she left his room alone. Hours passed. She knocked on the door after coming home from work around 4 p.m. No one answered.

Her concerns mounted, and she tried to open the locked bedroom door with a household tool. Once she got the door open, she walked inside to an empty bed. As she turned to leave the bedroom she saw a small amount of blood on the floor, then the body of her younger brother.

"As soon as that happened she freaked out and starting calling everyone to call the cops," said Beatriz Ramos, the friend who translated for Rios and asked to be identified by a variation of her name. "After that, the police said we couldn't go in, they wouldn't let us."

Rios-Hernandez came to the United States 10 years ago, following his older sister to Stamford, relatives said.

He lived with his sister and her 8-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son in the second-floor apartment of a four-unit multi-family home on Daly Street, just near the busy intersection of East Main Street and Glenbrook Road. Now Rios and her 27-year-old brother are trying to raise money to bury their sibling here instead of sending his body back to Guatemala.

Rios-Hernandez was a chef who worked with his 27-year-old brother in landscaping after losing his job. He was openly gay. Homosexuality was not widely tolerated in his home country, Ramos said.

Ramos said relatives of Rios-Hernandez are at a loss about what exactly happened to him in his bedroom. His sister provided a disturbing detail: It took some time for Rios-Hernandez to die from wounds to his head and face. It seemed like he died while crawling toward the door.

"He was trying to reach for the door," Ramos said. "There was some blood on the door."

Rios is planning to move out of the Daly Street apartment, Ramos said. Her children are traumatized from knowing their uncle was killed in a bedroom a few feet from their own.

Rios-Hernandez used to cook for the entire family, Ramos said. In fact, the final conversation between she and Rios-Hernandez was about a paella dish he planned to make Sunday afternoon.

"He had a lot of friends and a lot of people accepted him," Ramos said of Rios-Hernandez. "We accepted the way he was. That's why were still confused."

-- Staff Writer Jeff Morganteen can be reached at jeff.morganteen@scni.com or 203-964-2215.